Microbial Community and Litter Quality Controls on Decomposition in Tropical Forests and oil palm
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PROVIDER: PRJEB36064 | ENA |
REPOSITORIES: ENA
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Project description:Native species that forage in farmland may increase their local abundances thereby affecting adjacent ecosystems within their landscape. We used two decades of ecological data from a protected primary rainforest in Malaysia to illutrate how subsidies from neighboring oil palm plantations triggered powerful secondary 'cascading' effects on natural habitats located >1.3?km away. We found (i) oil palm fruit drove 100-fold increases in crop-raiding native wild boar (Sus scrofa), (ii) wild boar used thousands of understory plants to construct birthing nests in the pristine forest interior, and (iii) nest building caused a 62% decline in forest tree sapling density over the 24-year study period. The long-term, landscape-scale indirect effects from agriculture suggest its full ecological footprint may be larger in extent than is currently recognized. Cross-boundary subsidy cascades may be widespread in both terrestrial and marine ecosystems and present significant conservation challenges.
| S-EPMC5738359 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Conversion of tropical forests into intensely managed plantations is a threat to ecosystem functions. On Sumatra, Indonesia, oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) plantations are rapidly expanding, displacing rain forests and extensively used rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) agro-forests. Here, we tested the influence of land use systems on root traits including chemical traits (carbon, nitrogen, mineral nutrients, potentially toxic elements [aluminium, iron] and performance traits (root mass, vitality, mycorrhizal colonization). Traits were measured as root community-weighed traits (RCWTs) in lowland rain forests, in rubber agro-forests mixed with rain forest trees, in rubber and oil palm plantations in two landscapes (Bukit Duabelas and Harapan, Sumatra). We hypothesized that RCWTs vary with land use system indicating increasing transformation intensity and loss of ecosystem functions. The main factors found to be related to increasing transformation intensity were declining root vitality and root sulfur, nitrogen, carbon, manganese concentrations and increasing root aluminium and iron concentrations as well as increasing spore densities of arbuscular mycorrhizas. Mycorrhizal abundance was high for arbuscular and low for ectomycorrhizas and unrelated to changes in RCWTs. The decline in RCWTs showed significant correlations with soil nitrogen, soil pH and litter carbon. Thus, our study uncovered a relationship between deteriorating root community traits and loss of ecosystem functionality and showed that increasing transformation intensity resulted in decreasing root nutrition and health. Based on these results we suggest that land management that improves root vitality may enhance the ecological functions of intense tropical production systems.
| S-EPMC4569261 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Rising global demands for food and biofuels are driving forest clearance in the tropics. Oil-palm expansion contributes to biodiversity declines and carbon emissions in Southeast Asia. However, the magnitudes of these impacts remain largely unquantified until now. We produce a 250-m spatial resolution map of closed canopy oil-palm plantations in the lowlands of Peninsular Malaysia (2 million ha), Borneo (2.4 million ha), and Sumatra (3.9 million ha). We demonstrate that 6% (or ≈880,000 ha) of tropical peatlands in the region had been converted to oil-palm plantations by the early 2000s. Conversion of peatswamp forests to oil palm led to biodiversity declines of 1% in Borneo (equivalent to four species of forest-dwelling birds), 3.4% in Sumatra (16 species), and 12.1% in Peninsular Malaysia (46 species). This land-use change also contributed to the loss of ≈140 million Mg of aboveground biomass carbon, and annual emissions of ≈4.6 million Mg of belowground carbon from peat oxidation. Additionally, the loss of peatswamp forests implies the loss of carbon sequestration service through peat accumulation, which amounts to ≈660,000 Mg of carbon annually. By 2010, 2.3 million ha of peatswamp forests were clear-felled, and currently occur as degraded lands. Reforestation of these clearings could enhance biodiversity by up to ≈20%, whereas oil-palm establishment would exacerbate species losses by up to ≈12%. To safeguard the region's biodiversity and carbon stocks, conservation and reforestation efforts should target Central Kalimantan, Riau, and West Kalimantan, which retain three-quarters (3.9 million ha) of the remaining peatswamp forests in Southeast Asia.
| S-EPMC3064377 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The oil palm fruit abnormality, mantled, is a somaclonal variant arising from tissue culture that drastically reduces yield, and has largely halted efforts to clone elite hybrids for breeding and oil production. Widely regarded as epigenetic, mantling had defied explanation, and has become an icon of unsustainability in environmentally sensitive tropical plantation crops. We identified the MANTLED gene using Epigenome Wide Association analysis of genetically identical palms from multiple clonal lineages. Hypomethylation of a LINE retrotransposon related to rice Karma, found in the intron of the homeotic gene DEFICIENS, is common to all mantled clones and is correlated with alternative splicing and loss of small RNA. DNA methylation is regained in spontaneous revertants accounting for non-Medelian inheritance of the Good Karma and Bad Karma epialleles. Thus epigenetic regulation of transposable elements results in somaclonal variation and provides a means to cull mantled nursery palms before committing limiting plantation resources to clonal propagation. DNA methylation profiling was performed using the McrBC DNA methylation dependent fractionation and microarray hybridization method as described in Lippman, Z., Gendrel, A. V., Colot, V. & Martienssen, R. Profiling DNA methylation patterns using genomic tiling microarrays. Nat Methods 2, 219-224 (2005).
2015-09-09 | GSE68410 | GEO
Project description:decomposition metagenome Metagenomic assembly
| PRJNA923095 | ENA
Project description:decomposition metagenome Raw sequence reads
| PRJNA918781 | ENA
Project description:Tropical forests in the Americas are undergoing rapid conversion to commercial agriculture, and many migratory bird species that use these forests have experienced corresponding populations declines. Conservation research for migratory birds in the tropics has focused overwhelmingly on shade coffee plantations and adjacent forest, but both cover types are now in decline, creating an urgent need to evaluate conservation opportunities in other agricultural systems. Here we compare how a community of 42 Neotropical migratory bird species and a subset of five conservation-priority species differ in usage and habitat associations among a secondary forest baseline and four expanding commercial plantation systems in Guatemala: African oil palm, teak, rubber, and mixed-native hardwoods. We found that mixed-native hardwood plantations supported the highest richness and diversity of all migrants and that the three hardwood plantation types generally outperformed oil palm in richness and diversity metrics. Despite this, oil palm supported high abundance of several common and widespread species also experiencing range-wide population declines and may therefore play an important role in conserving common species. Mature secondary forest hosted low abundance and diversity of the full migratory community, but high abundance and richness of conservation priority migrants along with native hardwood and teak plantations. Likewise, the percentage of forest cover on the landscape was positively associated with priority migrant abundance and richness but negatively associated with the abundance of migrants in general, highlighting how individual species within the broad group of Neotropical migratory landbirds respond differently to anthropogenic changes in land use. Across all cover types, the retention of tall overstory trees increased the abundance, richness, and diversity of all migrants, which indicates that vertical structural diversity and remnant trees are important habitat features for birds in agricultural landscapes. Our findings show that conservation opportunities exist in hardwood and oil palm plantations, though the species likely to benefit from conservation action will vary among plantation types. For the subset of conservation priority migrants, our results suggest that conservation efforts should combine strategies that retain and restore secondary forest, promote the adoption of native hardwood and teak plantations, and promote the retention of tall, remnant trees in agricultural landscapes.
| S-EPMC6312276 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The oil palm fruit abnormality, mantled, is a somaclonal variant arising from tissue culture that drastically reduces yield, and has largely halted efforts to clone elite hybrids for breeding and oil production. Widely regarded as epigenetic, mantling had defied explanation, and has become an icon of unsustainability in environmentally sensitive tropical plantation crops. We identified the MANTLED gene using Epigenome Wide Association analysis of genetically identical palms from multiple clonal lineages. Hypomethylation of a LINE retrotransposon related to rice Karma, found in the intron of the homeotic gene DEFICIENS, is common to all mantled clones and is correlated with alternative splicing and loss of small RNA. DNA methylation is regained in spontaneous revertants accounting for non-Medelian inheritance of the Good Karma and Bad Karma epialleles. Thus epigenetic regulation of transposable elements results in somaclonal variation and provides a means to cull mantled nursery palms before committing limiting plantation resources to clonal propagation. DNA methylation profiling was performed using the McrBC DNA methylation dependent fractionation and microarray hybridization method as described in Lippman, Z., Gendrel, A. V., Colot, V. & Martienssen, R. Profiling DNA methylation patterns using genomic tiling microarrays. Nat Methods 2, 219-224 (2005). DNA methylation profiling was performed on 54 parthenocarpic mantled ramet, 43 normal ramet and 1 ortet adult leaf samples. For each sample, two independent fractionations of total genomic DNA and DNA methylation-depleted DNA were performed. Each total DNA/methylation-depleted DNA pair was differentially labeled and hydrized to a custon Nimblegen microarray in a dye-swapped design (4 array hybridizations per sample).
2015-09-09 | E-GEOD-68410 | biostudies-arrayexpress